White Papers

Bentley delivers solutions for the entire lifecycle of infrastructure, tailored to the needs of the various professionals who will work on and with that infrastructure over its lifetime.

Find out how Bentley is Sustaining infrastructure as you explore a range of topics covering solutions, products, learning opportunities, and more in the following insightful white papers.

Download this powerful collection of 4 newly published whitepapers authored by A. B. (Buddy) Cleveland, an accomplished author with over 30 years of technology experience in the infrastructure industry, including Bechtel and most recently former SVP of Bentley's Applied Research Group. These four papers offer compelling insights into how innovative technology, people, and organizations are meeting the challenges of sustaining infrastructure through interoperability, information mobility, and improved asset lifecycle management.

"If projects are the engines that drive an infrastructure asset's lifecycle, then information is the fuel." Buddy Cleveland

Interoperability Platform: i-models to Unlock the Value of Information Mobility by A.B. Cleveland, Jr. In 2008, Bentley published an Interoperability Platform white paper that provides background information on the issues and challenges associated with the interoperability of information technology systems supporting the lifecycle of infrastructure assets. Interoperability Platform: i-models to Unlock the Value of Information Mobility begins with a brief summary of that paper as well as an update on the issues surrounding interoperability and the key elements of Bentley’s interoperability platform strategy. It then focuses on the implementation of i-models (containers for the open exchange of infrastructure information), which are fundamental to Bentley’s overall interoperability strategy of enabling information mobility in a secure environment across multidisciplinary teams and the infrastructure lifecycle—from design and engineering to construction and into operations and maintenance.

Sustaining Infrastructure by A. B. Cleveland, Jr.There is an increasingly significant level of urgency surrounding the world’s infrastructure. Bentley's mission has long focused on helping our users improve the world’s infrastructure by providing software solutions, products, and services that improve the productivity and quality of the work of infrastructure professionals throughout the lifecycle (design-build-operate) of infrastructure assets.

Interoperability Platform by A. B. Cleveland, Jr.Sustaining our society and our environment requires infrastructure. Driven by new technologies, new requirements, new partners, and focused on infrastructure assets bound to a specific geographic location, each infrastructure project is unique. But all face common challenges: increasing demands for lower cost and shorter schedules; project teams that consist of multiple,globally distributed organizations and much more.

Managing and Leveraging Change in Infrastructure Assets by A.B. Cleveland, Jr.Infrastructure provides the basic facilities, services, and installations required for a community or society to function. This includes facilities – which we’ll refer to as infrastructure assets – such as transportation and communications systems, water and power lines, power generation facilities, structures to house public institutions including schools, post offices, and so on.

Information Management Strategies for Structural IntegrityConventional asset integrity management methods often involve multiple organizations across distributed enterprises (e.g., in-house, contractors, technicians, specialists) working in disconnected workflows with a wide variety of disparate, technical, esoteric, and non-graphical data sources in multiple specialist software systems that are relevant only to specific sub-asset types. This inconsistency and lack of clarity is a barrier to common understanding, introducing risk and inefficiency. Bentley’s approach is different. Dedicated to sustaining the world’s infrastructure, Bentley applies sophisticated engineering information management strategies to facilitate a consistent and auditable process of integrity management across distributed enterprises and multiple asset types.

The Race for More Oil: Best Practices for Safer, Stronger Offshore StructuresWith demand for oil projected to keep climbing, oil companies are exploiting harder-to-reach reservoirs and keeping existing assets operating much longer. Designing a platform for harsh conditions or deep water that is easy to build, cost-effective to install, and safe to operate is no easy feat – and the risk of failure is high. Assets must be operational for 20 years, 30 years, or longer to maximize extraction from existing sources, and require constant monitoring to ensure that modifications are safe and effective. Learn how offshore engineers and naval architects are achieving best practices for safer, stronger offshore structures utilizing modern design technologies.

Safety: An Investment in Business Sustainability and Effective Risk ManagementLarge-scale infrastructure projects – for example, bridges, factories, buildings, power plants, and mines – require very large financial investments. So it’s a top priority for executives embarking on such projects to maximize return on assets through effective risk management. But this isn’t easy to achieve if your organization hasn’t taken the right steps to avoid delays and disruptions in project execution and startup – or proactively manage safety risks for sustainable, operational stability. Today, it’s possible to transform corporate culture and processes in ways that enable everyone to participate actively in creating incident- and injury-free projects and safe work environments.

Bentley Solutions: Oil and GasToday’s complex oil and gas facilities bring together key engineering and related disciplines needed to design, engineer, and operate the facility across its entire lifecycle. This white paper provides an overview of Bentley’s oil and gas solution and how it addresses key aspects of the lifecycle from conceptual plant engineering, front-end engineering and design (FEED), detailed design, and construction through handover and operations.

3D City GIS - A Major Step Towards Sustainable Infrastructure (long version), or download short versionLocal governments are challenged by growing city populations, leading to increasing demands on local infrastructure. As existing infrastructure deteriorates in these dense urban areas, new infrastructure must be built, event though most areas of the world currently face decreasing financial and environmental resources.

In the past, geospatial data was mostly 2D, but interest in 3D maps has increased dramatically. Today, it's widely recognized that 3D city models for visual simulation help support urban planning, and the promotion of tourism on the web.

Power GenerationThe Energy Information Administration predicts strong growth for worldwide energy demand – a 57 percent increase over 26 years. At the same time, governments around the world are establishing limits on the emission of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, and mercury. Accommodating all these conflicting requirements means quickly bringing cleaner forms of power generation onto the grid and simultaneously upgrading existing fossil fuel power plants such that they can be operated without prohibitive expense while minimizing their environmental impact. To help meet these critical challenges, Bentley introduces the Bentley power generation solution for conceptual design, detail design, operation, and maintenance of power plants.

ISO 15926 - Lifecycle Data for Process PlantBy going beyond data handover, ISO 15926 has become the standard for interoper­ability and collaboration between complex data models of all types, including both 2D and 3D data models. This white paper explains ISO 15926 for the lifecycle data of process plants, its history and its business value.

Best Practices in Front-End DesignEvery year, owner-operators invest several billion dollars constructing new plants, revamping existing ones, improving safety and environmental compliance, and increasing system reliability. They invest even more in asset management and maintenance programs. This white paper presents Bentley's approach to addressing the workflow challenges faced by process engineers during front-end engineering.

The Digital Factory: From Concept to RealityA Bentley Solution Paper for Automobile Manufacturers. Bentley offers automobile manufacturers a flexible,scalable solution for planning, engineering, constructing, operating, and maintaining their manufacturing facilities. The Bentley solution for factories reduces costs in pre-production, compresses time to market, and preserves the valuable data generated from planning for use by all stakeholders, optimizing information management for the lifetime of the facility.

Industry Foundation Classes (IFC): BIM Interoperability Through a Vendor-Independent File FormatbuildingSMART International, formerly the International Alliance for Interoperability, is an alliance of organizations within the construction and facilities management industries. Its mission is to contribute to a sustainable built environment through smarter information sharing and communication. It also develops and maintains the specification for Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), an open vendor-independent neutral file format that captures both geometry and properties of ‘intelligent’ building objects and their relationships within building information models. This facilitates the coordination of information across incompatible applications, which is a prerequisite for improving building workflows using building information modeling (BIM) methods. The process eliminates the high cost and waste created by inadequate interoperability.

Asset Information: The Foundation of Asset Management Best Practices“Asset management” has become a buzzword to describe all aspects of managing an organization’s assets. Often, it is used narrowly to describe individual activities, such as maintenance work or condition assessments. However, asset management is more than just the management of physical infrastructure. It involves the use of all information available to make informed decisions, taking into account stakeholders, processes, policies, lifecycle, and costs.

Procuring a Linear Referencing SolutionThis white paper discusses the benefits a linear referencing solution (LRS) can bring to an organization, and explains how it can become the foundation of an organization’s asset management processes. To achieve the latter, the LRS will need to meet regional standards and provide certain asset management functionally, such as the asset register. This paper proposes that the LRS and asset register should be closely coupled or integrated to provide the best possible foundation for an organization’s asset management needs.

Performance ImprovementNuclear power plants in the United States have continued to improve their performance steadily over the past decade. In 2007, according to industry data, these plants achieved a record-low production cost of 1.68 cents per kilowatt hour and a record-high level of electricity production. This is a result of many high-performing nuclear fleets that have evolved since deregulation in 1997. Nuclear electricity generation is also expected to significantly offset increased carbon dioxide emissions and long-term climate change concerns.

Design EngineeringWhen owner-operators first opened the doors to their newly constructed nuclear plants years ago, many had no system for finding and retrieving their plants’ design basis information. As a result, they had to spend huge sums of money to reconstitute their respective plant’s design basis. Unfortunately, most of these efforts ended up in a dusty back room, never to be seen again. Of course, to be efficient and safe, plant configuration management must be maintained, and doing so effectively means the plant design basis must be an active part of the design change process.

Managing Change: Asset Information Management in the Oil and Gas IndustryWithin the oil and gas industry, stakeholders associated with a given organization require a secure information modeling platform for asset lifecycle information management. The platform should be delivered via a suite of interoperable applications and services designed to improve the management, operational performance, efficiency, safety, and compliance of oil and gas-based infrastructure assets, while readily handling any number of variables created by handover and change.

Using Information Management to Improve Nuclear Facility Safety and Regulatory ComplianceAs explored in this paper, the ultimate goal of having a safe and productive nuclear facility simply cannot be achieved without integrated IM systems that take into account the interdependencies of safety, planning, efficiency, and economics. Effective IM ensures that people at all levels have accessible, high-quality information to make good decisions that lead to better safety, efficiency, and compliance. Bad decisions – which are the root cause of many incidents at nuclear facilities – are typically made by well-intentioned people based on poor information.

The Changing Face of Surveying within the Mining IndustryIn order to improve productivity, while reducing costs, many mining owner-operators are leveraging their digital data across an enterprise. Often described as “information mobility” – manipulating digital data provides the key to unlock value across the entire mine lifecycle. As the mining industry transitions into this era of digital data and information mobility, there is growing recognition of the vast scale of the data created and the need to better manage, maintain, and disseminate this information across the entire organization.